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Monday, February 8, 2016

The Coming War.

Is a major conflict between the US and China inevitable? Such a war would be a catastrophe and only the working class internationally can prevent it. The views in the piece below are the author's own and we share them for the interest of our readers.

War and Peace
by Dan Armstrong

The US ruling class has,
as we all know, been busy trying to finalise a wave of counter
revolutions in regions outside the old communist bloc but where US
capitalism had not held complete sway. Thus throughout the Middle East
and North Africa destablising uprisings were initiated and had the aim
of opening direct control of state-owned oilfields. As we know most of
these went so badly wrong that far from gaining more control, the US
ended up with expensive military campaigns, less political control and
is now coming under threat by new cancerous fundamentalist forces with
metastases establishing themselves from west Africa through to
Indonesia, from Northern Europe to Australia. American military
expenditure in and of itself has not been able to impose American
capitalism's will on those regions where armed conflict has been the norm
for over a decade. The giant has political feet of clay.

On
another front, the western powers have defied international agreements reached after the collapse of the USSR in
relation to nuclear disarmament that they would not seek to extend
NATO's membership and territories in return for the destruction of
Ukraine's stock of atomic weapons; instead NATO has crept further and
further eastwards aided by staged calls by the Baltic states, by Georgia
and more recently by Ukraine to join NATO and / or be covered by NATO's
military shield. Except for the Baltic states, in the other two cases,
the US so far failed to get its own way. Each reaction by Russia to
counter the expansionism has been characterised as Russian
"imperialism". At the same time, Putin's own ambitions to re-establish
Russia's power have been well served by the West's behaviour, allowing
the government to raise the military budget from ca. 20 billion US
dollars in 1999 to 90 billion in 2012. Although a steep rise, the US
spent ca. 300 billion dollars in 1999 but 680 billion in 2012. This last figure is the same amount as spent by the next
TEN nations added together.

These
two fronts in Europe and the Middle East are highly problematical for
the US and its western allies (or vasall states). In both areas the US
military has not been able to impose its rule easily. But there is a
larger, strategic problem facing US capitalism. As a hugely important
economic power, the US has been able to develop technology and
productive capacity as well as military strength expressed in state of
the art hardware. But rivals have appeared on the scene to challenge US
hegemony in all of these areas. We saw the Asian Tiger economies ride
the growth wave before 2000, producing cheap electronics, cars, etc,
although Japan's strength has been sapped by over a decade of internal
debt. And
Korea has for objective reasons in the size of its population not been
able to build beyond a certain point. But as we all know, China's
tremendous growth was based on a flood of credit linked into objective
backwardness internally and its ability to undercut prices abroad for
consumer goods and some commodities to sell to western and other
markets. It has actually raised its status to the second largest economy
on the planet. This is well enough known but what consequences can be
drawn?

Up until recently, China was
mainly an export-led economy. But now, economic growth rests on an
internal consumer market, selling to newly prosperous workers and the
middle class with much less need to export. A consumer credit bubble in
housing and share price speculation have caused wobbles in growth which
have reverberated around the world economy. The US ruling class may have
invested in Chinese manufacturing but it cannot control the actions of
the government. It also regards
with displeasure the drive of Chinese enterprises into acquisition of
vast areas of arable land in Africa and of water resources, copper
deposits, rare earths and much more. Of late US imperialism has been
condemning the growth of Chinese naval strength and the creation of
artificial islands as future bases in the Pacific.

Taken
all in all, a comparison of this present rivalry between not primarily
the US and Europe but between the US and China is irresistible. The last
important period when new capitalist powers arose to challenge the
world's superpower was 1880 to 1913. All the above indices were
paralleled then by the challenge of the new industrial powers of the USA
and of Germany to the giant Great Britain. The productive forces were
pushing the US into expansion southwards and westwards; Germany was
blocked by its continental geographic position. It was clear that
conflict was inevitable but unclear as to who would clash with whom.
Germany almost engaged in
hostilities with France in north Africa. A clash between the US and
the UK could easily have erupted. As we know, Germany's government
decided on a war of aggressive to paralyse Belgium in order to dominate
the Channel ports and begin a conflict with the British Empire, wholly
dependent on sea power. This decision was taken in spite of the fact
that Germany, Britain, France and the US all had financial investments
in each other's economies and their respective ruling classes all
foretold a disastrous future if a new war were to break out. And yet,
the forces at work were so powerful that the conflict did occur. In 1913
a deep economic recession pushed the parties over the edge and within a
year war broke out. And the consequences were probably more disastrous
even than foretold, even threatening continent-wide social revolution
and the end of great empires.

The next
world recession will reveal more the weaknesses of the old powers, may
well kill off the dollar as the single reserve currency, the same factor which effectively
ended Britain's status as a super power when the pound was replaced by
gold and then as a coup de grace by the dollar. Given the present
balance of forces, given the vulnerability of the US share of markets,
the cost of its foreign military bases, the astronomical national debt
of 19 trillion dollars only viable as long as the dollar holds its
present status , its erosion status as reserve currency - in these
circumstances can we expect that the US ruling class will stand by and
watch China continue to move towards the world's number one economy, the
pacific and Indian ocean prime naval power, the possessor of vital
resources and commodities?

Is it not much more likely that the US will move against China before it is too late?